Props - Scenery and Sky

Obviously before rendering, I needed to create scenery for the animation to take place in. And because I wanted to sync with the original cartoon behind my production, I first looked at clips for inspiration and ideas.

My findings were that for the majority of fight scenes within Dragon Ball are based in an open space, mainly with plain surroundings. This made the process for creating my scenery much easier because it would not take me ages to create and still link well with the original productions. That was my main aim to produce something that was easily understandable and identifiable to the cartoon of my idea.

So for the scene I simply produced a plane that I could then add a map to and also add some sort of distortion to create the 'rock-like' texture. I achieved this by adding the distort modifier to the plane and adding the chosen JPEG file. I could then change the strength of the distort.

In previous modules of my University course involving 3D animation, I have had trouble when creating a sky effect. I have used an environment map and a sky dome, but I personally thought both were not that great even though I followed tutorials to produce them. However, because the cartoon I am basing my work on has a basic sky for the majority of fight scenes, using an enivornment map taken from the cartoon for this animation was the perfect choice. It gives the animation that cartoon feel and gives the 3D production a 2D feel to it also.

I had now completed the scene and the sky, now the last step was to create the lighting. I chose to use a daylight system as I really like the shadows that it creates on the characters and the lighting looks a lot more realistic than using an omni or target light.